


Entheos

by heartstone



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Ambiguous Plot, I'm really sorry, M/M, Past Forth Age, Rebirth, This Story Is Really Weird, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21822481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstone/pseuds/heartstone
Summary: White light erupted from his skin as he fell, the solar winds eroding away his flesh and splitting its single hue into a corona of brilliant iridescence. He feared that the merciless plasma of those celestial winds would disintegrate him into a shimmer of stardust, one that could never be put back into the same shape again.***Melkor is reborn.
Relationships: Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor/Sauron | Mairon
Comments: 14
Kudos: 38





	Entheos

“That which dies shall know life in death, for all that decays is not forgotten and, reanimated, it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”

Jeff VanderMeer, from his book _Annihilation._

_***_

White light erupted from his skin as he fell, the solar winds eroding away his flesh and splitting its single hue into a corona of brilliant iridescence. He feared that the merciless plasma of those celestial winds would disintegrate him into a shimmer of stardust, one that could never be put back into the same shape again. He curled in upon himself, a pearl nucleus to the colour that bled into the black sky, but it did not prevent the flesh of his back that met the terrible rending wind from being ionized into pale glistening blues and faded ashen pinks and softened purples. He screamed when the winds penetrated into his exposed ribs and spine, and the sound that came from him was as a single sustained tone, long and piercing.

As he faded from consciousness and all awareness of his form was melted from him to stain the sky in a thin vein of light, he had only one final thought that calmed him: _I am a seed, and from my stardust a new word shall germinate and within it I shall be reborn._

***

When he awoke, he had no memory of his fall to the earth. Laying on his back and looking up at the sky, he was as empty as a newborn, and laughed at the shimmer of stardust that fell from above in gossamer curtains of rose and azure and heather. Around him the earth curled and furrowed into a shallow crater which cradled him like a manger, the snow which surrounded him a blanket. He was in the _North,_ wherever and whenever that was, and the air around him was so clear and still that it seemed like the world was fashioned by a luster of crystal and polished silver. Only the stardust moved, falling slowly, scattering upon the earth.

It took him a long time to sit up and disturb his blanket of snow, but the sheen of colour that fell from the sky intrigued him, and he could not help but desire to disturb the smooth hills of snow with the undulating curls and curves of waves in a mimicry of those that he had seen float down from the sky, this time made out of his own footprints and handprints. Yet, as he made to leap into the snow dunes and roll himself along the crisp fractals of millions of icy stars, a small round object that He had not noticed before dislodged from his chest like a key falling from a lock, and it fell into his lap.

It was stone. But the name _stone_ was unsuitable, for it shimmered in his hands even as he held it still. It fit neatly into his white palm, and the colours that were infused within it shifted as he looked so that the stardust from the sky seemed a poor imitation. A band of ivory bordered by flaxen made up the core of the stone, and small furls and twists of this band of intensifying colour permeated into the others- brilliant and impossible magenta, and carmine that turned into deep clouds of pale purple that broke for a plunge into the depths of sapphire. As he watched, a galaxy seemed to form in the stone, and in its center, a small spot of black turned with an unstoppable velocity that could only be seen with the effect of its distortion of the colour surrounding it.

He gripped it in his hands tightly, and he became suddenly aware of how large the dunes of snow were around him and how small he was among them. The smallness of the object did not help, for as He peered down, it seemed to expand and engulf him until He was a mote swirling around and around, ever closer to the black epicenter.

***

He dreamed he was looking down through his stone into the space above him. The sky was black but over time it slowly bloomed into many small particles of bursting luminosity. Streams of small pinpricks of and the thick mists of cosmic gases formed bigger shapes and the bigger shapes collided and consumed one another into even bigger shapes, their instability sustained by an increasing velocity towards. . . towards what? He kept observing as the primeval blackness was infiltrated from the inside out by these amorphous blotches of colour.

Suddenly the shapes moved and glided through the space like they were in water, bumping into one another. Their bodies were filled with many stars, beads that glistened in their glass bodies. A feathery wave crowned each of them, and they gripped onto one another for support with tiny holdfasts, stretching out in search of nourishment. He squinted down through his stone, watching as the shapes gathered around a white light before a music began to arise from the them, and the shapes began to quiver.

Just before he awoke, he realized that he had not been looking up at the sky, but had been looking into a drop of water, one that- moments before he had fallen unconscious- had fallen from the corner of his eye. He wondered how one was to tell which was small and which was large, when both the sky and the drop of water contained entire universes.

***

When he awoke, he was in a different place than before. He panicked, looking for the stone that had fallen from his chest, but finding that it was still clutched in his hand. He held it close to his heart without knowing why. Looking down at his closed fist, he realized that he was naked and that he was now in a field of wildflowers that seemed too delicate to have pushed through the heavy coverlet of snow, too ephemeral for their roots to have delved into the permafrost. And yet, his feet were cushioned by a thick layer of their petals, and He was partially shielded from the wind by the wildflowers which tickled his hips.

He did not know the names of the flowers that bloomed around him, only that they were beautiful and that he felt like he had seen them many eons ago, but had never quite _noticed_ them before. There were tall ones, with long furry stalks clustered in inflorescences with many proud flowers, their root to the earth shaded by clusters of pinnate leaves; there were flowers of diaphanous heather shaped like cups, nodding with the dew that spilled and sparkled between their fragrant buds; there were blue flowers that unfurled their petal-standards only at the end of their woody steams; and there were timid flowers the colour of the dawn that stayed low to the moss-like pillow of leaves that they blossomed from.

As he walked among them, he could not help but pluck from their myriad a cluster of blossoms with frilly and delicate petals. But as he lifted it to his face, the flowers wilted and dulled into an ashen white. The wind picked up, and the petals crumbled to dust, floating down slowly to his feet. He dropped the stem but found that he was not surprised that the flower had disintegrated with the cold, merciless wind. He held the stone tighter, so his knuckles turned an even brighter white than the snow.

He did not feel the cold wind like the flower had, even though he felt he should. But this lack of cold did not stop his newly-growing desire: it was the numbness inside of him that made him leave the field in search of warmth.

***

He dreamed he had wandered far from the field of flowers and that now there was only the glossy sheen of ice for leagues all around him. He wondered if the entire earth had turned into a polished snowball, even at the equator. Just at this thought, however, a great smoke filled the sky and clouded the many stars that had been lighting his way. The great swirling clouds of ash smelled metallic and fell to the ice, blackening it. As the ash fell from the sky in torrents of fury, it burned through the ice, and slowly he found that he was in a puddle that was growing into a pond, then into a lake, and then into a sea that encircled him. The roiling black waves rushed over his head and threatened to tear the stone that he clutched from his hand.

He struggled against the beating of the frothy water, but it submerged his mouth before he could scream. He still could not feel the cold, but the numbness was prickling him and he knew that those prickles were not needle-thin, but were stabs felt from far away. The muscles of his arm still held the stone to his chest even as he was completely engulfed, even as he realized he was being swirled all around by the withering petals from the field he thought he had left far behind. He realized that the petals had become blackened thorns, that as they swirled around him, they had been stabbing him in vengeance for the stem that he had plucked.

He tried to speak into the waves, but the gushing water filled his throat and lungs, paralyzing him. He could do nothing as the thorns gathered around him and burrowed into his eyes.

***

When he awoke, he was in a different place than before, but he still clutched the stone in his hand. He was looking down again, but it felt like he was looking up because the ice that he was standing on was as a black mirror of cold obsidian. He could see the stars as they trailed along the black sky, whirling by as if eons were passing in seconds. As he watched, mesmerized, his eyes trailed closer towards the ground at his feet, and he stepped back as he met his own eyes for the first time.

His eyes were two stones, glistening with the synthesis and collapse of galaxies and shimmering with stardust. His pupils were the epicenter, the black hole that kept the swirling mass of colour ever-changing, moving forwards in morphing, spiraling limbs made of stars and gases and planets and debris that lived and died and lived again within the galaxies. The nacreous clouds that composed the outer reaches of these galaxies in his eyes pulsated, and they shifted and swirled into an amorphous shimmer of fractal patterns that slowly took shape.

He was remembering something. Someone? He looked intently into his eyes before he looked so close that he fell, breaking through the ice and sinking slowly, slowly downwards.

***

He dreamed he was _home,_ but he did not know what that meant aside from an overwhelming feeling of warmth. The warmth curled around him, shielded him, protected him. He leaned into it and sighed. A song drifted up around him, and it was of a solitary wood instrument, deep and smooth in its voice and sure of its tune. But soon the song was interrupted by groaning metal and undulating mechanical sounds of parts moving, working in tandem but grinding through rust. He cringed. The sound was tired and mournful.

He realized once the wood instrument faded to the clacks and clanks of old machinery that he could open his eyes, and to his surprise he saw that he was holding his three stones. But how could he be holding them if he was looking at them, he wondered? The music around him was dented and whirred laboriously, falling apart. The machine sounded like it hadn’t been oiled in years, but when he looked around he could not see anything except the blaring light of the three stones in his hands and a darkness surrounding him.

He felt a sudden fear come upon him. The warmth of _home_ was fading and the music was degenerating into a cry for help so desperate and broken and terrible that he tried to ignore it and pretend that all would be alright if he just focused on the three stones in his hands. He caressed them, murmuring to them, mesmerized. The music pressed around him into a choppy, distorted sobbing, but he ignored it. As if to ward off the sounds for good, he leaned down close to the stones, so close his nose pressed against them and his eyes were blinded by their brilliance.

“My One, my own,” he whispered, and the music halted suddenly, as if waiting for the inevitable hissing words to come:

_“My Precious.”_

Somehow the silence that followed was more terrible.

***

When he awoke, he was in a different place than before, and he held the stone now in a careful understanding. It seemed to glow brighter now that he was nearer to his destination, to the warmth of his _home_. He tore his gaze from the luminosity clenched in his hand and peered instead up at the sky which was shimmering with waves of lapis and crimson and amethyst, strewn with the twinkling argent of the stars. The aurora curled and twisted in the sky and followed vast arches of an imaginary cathedral to the very axis of the earth, to the very pole. There the colour condensed and swirled like twisting waves around an unusual outcropping of ice embedded in a crater, the only he had seen in his journey in the flat planes aside from his own.

The area about him was completely silent, and it grew more oppressive as he circled to the other side of the ice where the glow was brightest. The colour was gold, so gold he did not know how the light didn’t solidify and fall from the air. Instead, it was he who fell to his knees and the sound of his falling echoed along the empty wastes. The colour was imbued into the ice, golden and warm. It flexed and shifted within the translucent crystals, and it slowly began to thaw itself, twisting and groaning as sheets of his prison splintered off and speared the field around it. He watched as slowly the amorphous shape fell down next to him in a shape so similar and so opposite his own.

The golden light suffused the shape, and gave him a halo of radiance that illuminated the silence and the darkness. A warmth emanated from it, a warmth of _home_ that he desired to return to. But he knew he would not be able to return without an absolution. He looked on at the shape as it quivered with instability, held together only by an increase in velocity. The scintillating shape swirled and swirled its opaline colour as the wind picked up. He was afraid that if he did not act in that moment, that the one thing he loved would be gone forever, spread as thin as the gossamer stardust above.

He took the stone in his hand and did not give it a second look. There was a hole in the shape before him, a blackness which the colour swirled around. He pressed the stone into the void.

And it was not void.

***

He dreamed he was _home,_ and he remembered what that meant in addition to the overwhelming feeling of warmth. He lay on his side as the shape finished forming before him, into a man that was a living flame. Three stones lay between them, a red one in the chest of the flame, a blue one in his own chest, and a violet one that they clutched between them, hand-in-hand. _“Forgive me,”_ he wanted to say, but the living flame pressed his free hand against his lips, hushing him.

“I already have,” he whispered, before he smiled, brilliantly, charmingly, so very _Precious._

**Author's Note:**

> I know this is a really weird story but I felt I needed to write it out and I spent too much time on it to not publish it. So thank you if you took the time to read this nonsense.  
> Entheos means "within God."  
> ***


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